Marcelo Garcia is one of the most legendary BJJ practitioners in the history of the sport and although his student Dillon Danis has achieved more mainstream fame, it’s been for drastically different reasons. It’s actually pretty hard to believe when looking at their respective careers that they were once frequent training partners on the mats. Not only have they taken massively diverging paths when it comes to combat sports, but their whole demeanour and general personalities seem completely at odds with one another. Where Garcia was always known as a happy and respectful competitor, Danis is known more for his trash talk and encounters with law enforcement.
Danis actually first met Garcia when he was still just a teenager, as he started taking regular trips to New York City to learn from him when he was 17. He had only recently started training Jiu-Jitsu just a few years prior to that, whereas Garcia had already won multiple ADCC and IBJJF World Championship titles. Garcia had only established his academy relatively recently at the time and had yet to promote anybody to black belt, so the talented youngster was a valuable addition to the team at the time. When Danis decided to pursue a professional Jiu-Jitsu career at the age of 19, he moved to New York City to train under Garcia full-time.
Dillon Danis went through the colored belt ranks under Marcelo Garcia and that journey culminated in a truly incredible run at brown belt. At the time, Danis was considered to be one of the top prospects in the sport and there was a fair amount of attention on him when Garcia promoted him to black belt in 2015. It wasn’t long before the relationship between the two men came to an end though, and it was actually shortly after Danis met Conor McGregor and began working as a key member of his training camp.
Danis began to cultivate something of a ‘bad boy’ persona on social media and in his public interactions, and this wasn’t the image that Garcia wanted his students to portray. That led to Garcia severing ties with Danis in 2017 and although Danis has continued training in a range of martial arts since then, he hasn’t ever taken Jiu-Jitsu as seriously as he did under Garcia. Instead he spent some time as an MMA fighter at Bellator and was more recently disqualified in a boxing match with Jake Paul. Danis has undoubtedly made a lot of money in his career of course, but his Jiu-Jitsu has never looked as good as it did when he was training under Garcia.
The full footage of Marcelo Garcia and Dillon Danis rolling together was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of Stuart Cooper:
Or for more of our articles looking into moments throughout BJJ history, visit our throwback archives.
